April 2011 Newsletter

I. What’s New

• First, check out what’s new at Mathematics and Multimedia. Let other people know what’s math to you by answering the Math is survey.
• I have two new blogs, the School of Freebies which is sharing blog about educational freebies on the net, and GeoGbra Applet Central a collection of my GeoGebra applets.  I have recently opened GeoGbra Applet Central for collaborators and currently I am working with William Emeny of Great Maths Teaching Ideas and MathsMaster.org, and Erlina Ronda of Teaching K-12 Mathematics. If you are interested to join you can contact me at mathandmultimedia@gmail.com.
• Math and Multimedia blog has a new partner blog, the Love of Learning Blog by Kristi Grande.

II. Mathematics/Teaching

• In basic mathematics, the series on operations on integers namely addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division has been finished.
• In trigonometry, we have discussed the  derivation of the cosine law.
• In statistics, we have discussed a new amazing dynamic statistics software called Gapminder and we have seen how Hans Rosling used it to present the health and wealth of the countries for the past 200 years.
• In math teaching, we have  talked about the difference among math exercises, problems, and investigations.
• We have also appreciated mathematics in nature by numbers and learned how to multiply using our fingers.
• For applets fans, we have more than 8000 mathematics applets from different websites.

III. Multimedia 

• Our multimedia articles this month focused on blogging. We have completed our WordPress Blogging Tutorial Series.  The next thing that we will learn is how to promote our blog for free, and I guess one of the most effective is  to automatically import blog posts in our Facebook Wall and to create a Facebook page.  To bloggers who have no theoretical background about the web, 20 Things I learned is an excellent resource.
• If we blog with quality, our readers might be grateful for our efforts, so we learned how to put a Paypal donate button on our blogs.
• We can’t write everything, sometimes, we have to vary the media so have  discussed on how to embed Scribd documents in WordPress. This is one of the posts of the new series called WordPress Extra.

IV. GeoGebra

• We have now more than 50 step GeoGebra tutorials. The latest tutorials are How to embed GeoGebra applets in Moodle (a video which is not really our own, but very helpful), and Animation and Hypocycloids.
• We have now created more than 60 GeoGebra applets. We have also some new cool applets at GeoGebra Applet Central: (1) Simulating paper folding on constructing a square, finding the centroid of a triangle, and folding a hyperbola.

V. Miscellany

• We have enjoyed the Mathematics and Multimedia Carnival 10. Love of Learning blog will host the 11th edition, while I will host the next Math Teachers at Play Carnival. Please submit to both carnivals by clicking these here and here.
• An inspirational story of teachers at SOMEBODY up there pushed me.
• We have also some light math such as Potato chips and mathematics.